STORY · MENTO
Smutty songs and the respectable ear
Well supported
From mento's bawdy word-play to a BBC-banned reggae hit, Jamaican music kept colliding with the politics of decency.
How mento's rustic innuendo, and the respectability that judged it, set a template for a century of arguments about what Jamaican music was allowed to say.
The candour of the countryside
Jamaica's first commercially recorded popular music, mento, carried a strong current of comic, thinly veiled sexual word-play. Recordings built on rustic innuendo were among the most popular of the era, and the double-entendre tradition was cherished by rural audiences for its wit even as respectable society recoiled.
That recoil was not incidental. A middle-class culture of respectability, inherited from colonial values, treated the bawdy, the Creole and the working-class as coarse. The same instinct pushed mento toward a sanitised tourist 'calypso' for hotel audiences, smoothing the rough edges the music's own listeners prized.
Dialect, decency and the ban
The argument was never only about sex; it was about voice. Louise Bennett faced decades of condescension for performing in Jamaican Creole, dismissed by some as vulgar 'dialect' before being embraced as a national treasure. When Max Romeo's 'Wet Dream' reached Britain in 1969, the BBC banned it for its lyric while it climbed the charts anyway, a foreign gatekeeper meeting a very old Jamaican tradition of innuendo.
What one ear heard as smut, another heard as the plain speech of a people.
It took scholars like Carolyn Cooper, whose work reclaimed the 'vulgar' body of Jamaican popular culture, to name the pattern: that the charge of indecency was often a charge against the poor and the Black vernacular itself. The mento argument, in that light, was the first draft of every censorship debate that followed.